An attorney who represents undocumented immigrants who have worked at President Donald Trump's golf courses in New Jersey and New York said Tuesday that he is seeking deportation protection for his clients so they can share allegations of harassment, abuse and immigration fraud that they said they witnessed and experienced at work.

Anibal Romero, who has a law practice in Newark and represents 20 undocumented immigrants who say they have worked at the Trump National Golf Clubs in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Briarcliff Manor, New York, said the Trump Organization is a "criminal enterprise" that has hired undocumented immigrants for years. Some of these workers, he said, have been physically abused and threatened with deportation.

"All of them are material witnesses to a federal crime, and any attempt to try and remove them from the United States could possibly be obstruction of justice,'' he said in a conference call with reporters, saying that he has received calls from other workers of the Trump Organization who live in other parts of the country.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Eric Trump, the son of the president and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that it will begin to institute E-Verify, a federal program that allows employers to check whether new hires are legally eligible to work in the United States, in every one of its golf clubs, hotels and resorts.

File photo taken in 2017 shows the entrance of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

Romero was joined on the conference call by D. Taylor, president of UNITE Here, the hotel and restaurant workers union; and David Leopold, a partner with Ulmer & Berne LLP and a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Romero said he has met this week with several lawmakers, including New Jersey's Democratic senators, Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, seeking their support for "deferred action."

Menendez met Tuesday morning in Washington with several undocumented immigrants who worked at Trump properties, according to Steven Sandberg, a spokesman, who added that Menendez supports "congressional oversight" in the matter.

A call to Booker's office was not immediately returned Tuesday.

About a dozen workers at Trump National in Westchester County, including landscapers and housekeepers, were fired this month because they were in the country illegally, according to a report by The Washington Post.

The firings came about a month after The New York Times reported that undocumented immigrants had submitted fraudulent documentation when they were hired to work as housekeepers at Trump National in Bedminster, and that they were kept on the payroll for years even though they said management was aware of their legal status.

Romero, who is calling for congressional, federal and state investigations into the matter, said he has received calls from both the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, which he said asked him for documentation, and the New York Attorney General's Office. He said he is scheduling a meeting with officials in the New York office.

Leland Moore, a spokesman for the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, declined to comment, saying that the office does not confirm or deny investigations.

The undocumented immigrants were working at Trump businesses as Trump campaigned on curbing illegal immigration, and more recently as he has pushed for funding for a border wall, setting up a fight with Democrats in Congress that resulted in the longest partial government shutdown in the country's history.

"We have a situation whereby we have a president who has criminalized, demonized, dehumanized and blamed immigrant workers, both as he was running for president and as president," said Taylor, whose union represents more than 275,000 hotel and restaurant workers, a majority of whom are immigrants, people of color and women. "And at the same time, we have the exact same organization hiring, abusing workers, who he says are responsible for crime in this country, and in fact all they are doing is working hard providing for themselves and their families and trying to have a better life."

Romero and Taylor said the undocumented workers were not given health insurance or retirement benefits, and that they were paid less than their counterparts who had legal status. Romero said there was no "upward mobility,'' meaning access to promotions, for his clients. One woman he represents was demoted from her role as a supervisor when they found out she was undocumented, he said.

"I think it's up to lawmakers now to investigate this as a criminal activity, but also both Republicans and Democrats have to step up and really deal with the immigration issue in a comprehensive way,'' Taylor said. "What the Trump organization has done is not unique in this country, but what is unique is we have the head of that organization be the president."

One of the women profiled in the Times story, Victorina Morales, spoke Tuesday during the conference call. A native of Guatemala, Morales said she arrived in the United States in 1999 and that she worked for Trump National in Bedminster for five years and had access to his living quarters while he was running for president. When Trump was elected, she said, she was told she would no longer be allowed to work in his residence.

She was later told that she had to resubmit her documentation, including her residency and Social Security cards. When she first was hired, she had submitted fraudulent documentation. She said a supervisor helped her get new fraudulent paperwork for $165, and that they took pictures for the green card at the golf course. Morales previously told the Times that she ended up borrowing $165 from a manager at the resort to pay someone in Plainfield for a new bogus Social Security number and phony green card to replace the ones she had initially submitted for the position.

She said she has been subjected to verbal abuse several times, and that one supervisor pushed her against the wall three times.

"That's when I thought that the reason she is acting this way is because of the way the president speaks on TV,'' Morales said in Spanish, with Romero translating. "There are a lot of people who want to speak, but I'm sure they are afraid because there were a lot of threats.

"If someone filed a lawsuit, they would call immigration," she added.

Leopold said the allegations emphasize the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

"This case underscores not only the criminal activity of the president of the United States and his businesses and his family, but underscores a problem in this country that in a way we are all complicit in," he said, "and that is allowing a permanent underclass of worker to go on, and that needs to stop."